Stan Musial on the campaign trail

Stan Musial, the baseball legend who died Saturday at the age of 92, never ran for or held elected office but he did make his presence felt on the campaign trail one election season.

According to George Vecsey’s 2011 biography, “Stan Musial: An American Life,” the St. Louis Cardinals slugger spent part of the fall of 1960 on a celebrity speaking tour for Sen. John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. The goal was to deploy some well-known Americans in areas where the youthful Catholic presidential candidate might still be considered exotic or even alien, an effort to help JFK establish credibility through association.

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Among the others on the tour: football great Byron “Whizzer” White (later a Kennedy appointment to the Supreme Court), writer James Michener, and movie stars Jeff Chandler and Angie Dickinson. Musial at the time was deep into his 22-year playing career with St. Louis.

On what Michener would describe “as grueling a tour as could have been devised,” Musial was a leading attraction.

“I was constantly astonished at how the men in the cities we stopped at would crowd the airports to see Stan Musial,” Michener would later write, according to Vecsey. “He seemed about 15 years younger than he was, and men who were now quite old remembered him as a beginner in the big leagues.”

The team’s efforts were not wholly successful but they weren’t totally futile. The Kennedy ticket lost seven of the states they appeared in (Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Utah), but did manage to win the other two states they visited (Illinois and Michigan), helping the Democrat pull out a controversial, razor-thin victory over Republican nominee Richard Nixon.

“Stan the Man,” according to Vecsey, only met JFK once more, when he was in Washington for the 1962 All-Star Game. Musial would, however, later serve as chair of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports from 1964 to 1967 under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and he was honored by President Barack Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

Still, all that paled to his accomplishments on the baseball diamond: seven-time National League batting champion, three-time NL MVP, three-time World Series champion with the St. Louis Cardinals, and first-ballot Hall of Famer. That 1969 election for Cooperstown, unlike the Kennedy-Nixon duel, was a landslide, with Musial being named on 93.2 percent of the ballots.